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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Click on the questions below to learn the answers.
Q: Who is Local Energy?
Q: Why do my energy bills keep getting higher and higher?
Q: But isn't there plenty of oil and gas available if we just allow more drilling?
Q: But I've heard that there are almost limitless supplies in Canada , in the oceans, all over the world. Why can't we just develop new technologies to extract them?
Q: So should I just get used to higher energy bills?
Q: What can we do to avoid the worst of the energy degradation problem?
Q: What's the grant you were awarded?
Q: What was Local Energy's proposal?
Q: Why do you think your proposal was funded?
Q: What exactly is "biomass"?
Q: Are biomass fuels always cleaner than oil or gas?
Q: How would the district-energy system work?
Q: What are biomass boilers?
Q: Where would the biomass boilers be located?
Q: What about air pollution from the biomass boiler?
Q: How much biomass would be required to heat downtown Santa Fe .
Q: Where would the biomass come from?
Q: How much will heat from the system cost?
Q: Can anyone connect to the biomass district heating system?
Q: What are the primary benefits of the project?
Q: Are there down sides to the project?
Q: What are the next steps to move the project forward?
Q: What do you mean by renewable fuels? Fossil fuels?
Q: The film shows data on "first-year decline rate" for gas wells. What does this mean?
LOCAL ENERGY
Q: Who is Local Energy?
A: Local Energy is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We were incorporated in April, 2003 to help communities cope with the hardships resulting from the unprecedented events taking place within the energy industry-specifically, the peaking of world oil production and the decline of the North American natural-gas supply. Our main focus is on helping communities develop greater self-reliance in energy by harnessing local energy resources in ways that provide the greatest benefit to their local economies. Since most of the money currently spent on energy typically leaves the community, our work includes the development of locally and community-owned energy businesses. These types of businesses can serve local energy needs without draining dollars from the local economy.
ENERGY RESOURCE DEGRADATION
Q: Why do my energy bills keep going higher and higher?
A: According to industry experts, it's because the demand for energy continues to rise faster than the supply. Unfortunately, this explanation doesn't begin to tell the real story of the crisis that is unfolding. The ongoing degradation of oil and gas supplies worldwide ensures that the energy situation is not going to improve anytime soon.
Q: But isn't there plenty of oil and gas available if we just allow more drilling?
A: It's true that energy resources are still plentiful, but the U.S. energy supply crisis has little to do with the quantity of resources remaining. The real problem stems from the fact that the remaining resources, although abundant, are of lower quality . To the energy industry, resource quality is a measure of the effort and expense that must be invested to extract and process the resource before it can be sold. The industry's longstanding practice of always extracting the highest-quality resources available has resulted in a steady erosion in the quality of the remaining resource base. We have already used up the highest-quality, easily accessible supplies, and we now find ourselves drilling more wells, in deeper waters, further from home, at greater expense and impact on the environment. Despite massive increases in effort, the rate at which energy supplies are brought to market remains about the same, or in many cases, declines.
Q: But I've heard that there are almost limitless supplies in Canada , in the oceans, all over the world. Why can't we just develop new technologies to extract them?
A: New technologies allow recovery of harder-to-get oil and gas resources, but if anything, this makes the resource degradation problem worse. Extracting useful energy from the tar sands of Canada or from the methane hydrates on the ocean floor may sound promising, but the amount of energy needed to accomplish it makes them problematic. The abundance of such low-quality energy resources doesn't help, because the real problem is rooted in the scarcity of high-quality energy resources.
Q: So should I just get used to higher energy bills?
A: Your bills will continue to increase as the problem worsens. Unfortunately, the problem extends well beyond high utility bills. Rising energy costs create a ripple effect throughout the economy-locally, nationally, even internationally. As the cost of fuels goes up, the cost of producing goods and services increases, along with the cost of delivering them to market. This in turn pushes prices upward for all goods and services, at a time when higher utility bills are reducing the purchasing power of consumers.
Q: What can we do to avoid the worst of the energy degradation problem?
A: The solution centers on reducing dependence on non-local sources of energy, beginning with cutting energy consumption through improved efficiency and conservation. At the same time, communities must develop local infrastructure for harnessing and utilizing locally available energy resources. The first priority should be projects that can reduce and stabilize energy costs at key facilities within the community, such as schools and municipal buildings. All projects should be structured such that, to the greatest degree possible, energy dollars are kept circulating within the local community.
THE SANTA FE BIOMASS DISTRICT ENERGY PROJECT
Q: What's the grant you were awarded?
A: Our proposal was funded under the U.S.Department of Agriculture's "Biomass Research and Development Initiative," which was authorized by congress under the 2002 Farm Bill. The competition was stiff, with only 19 awards given out of more than 400 proposals received. The solicitation we responded to is here:
http://www.bioproducts-bioenergy.gov/pdfs/BiomassRFP2003.pdf
Q: What was Local Energy's proposal?
A: Local Energy believes that the best way to increase the utilization of biomass is to demonstrate how biomass projects can generate economic development and protect communities from the hardships of higher heating bills. So, we proposed a project that would combine state-of-the-art technical design for a biomass district heating system with the best methods and practices for local economic development to create a "market-driven" approach for stimulating new biomass projects.
Specifically, our project proposes to do three things:
a. Design a biomass-fired district-energy system for downtown Santa Fe
b. Quantify and maximize the local economic benefits of implementing the system
c. Quantify and maximize the environmental benefits of operating the system
The cost of the project is around $1.7 million, with nearly $1.3 million being funded by the USDA, and most of the rest coming from in-kind contributions. Note that this project is only to design and study the benefits of the district-energy system, not to construct it.
Q: Why do you think your proposal was funded?
A: When we got the call announcing our award, we were told that the reviewers were impressed by our unique approach of proposing to use biomass to simultaneously address both an urban problem and a rural problem. (The urban problem is heating-fuel insecurity and rising heating costs, and the rural problem is wildfire danger due to fuel overloading.) Our focus on using biomass in ways that maximize local economic benefits has been very well-received. Supporters of our project include Senators Pete Domenici (the head of Senate Energy Committee) and Jeff Bingaman, Representative Tom Udall, the City and County (by joint resolution), the State Land Office, The SF Railyard Community Corporation, and many others.
Q: What exactly is "biomass"?
A: Biomass is solar energy that has been stored in organic materials, such as trees and plants. The most common example is firewood, which releases its energy as heat when it is burned. Soybeans and corn, which can be compressed to extract oil that can then be made into liquid fuels called biodiesel and ethanol, are also common forms of biomass.
Q: Are biomass fuels always cleaner than oil or gas?
A: It depends on what fuel you use and how you use it. All fuels, whether fossil or biomass, cause emissions when burned. For example, burning wood in a stove or fireplace emits smoke and particulates, which can pollute the air. But the wood burned in one of the new high-efficiency boilers emits much lower levels of particulates. Also, net emissions of carbon dioxide, a "greenhouse gas," are dramatically lower than when burning fossil fuels.
Q: How would the district-energy system work?
A: District-energy systems are common throughout the U.S. , and consist of a central heating plant and an underground network of pipes that carry heat from building to building. The older systems used steam to transport the heat, but it is more common now to simply use hot water, which is the kind of system we designed. Many of the buildings in downtown Santa Fe already have hot-water heating systems, and the new district-energy system would simply tie in and utilize those existing systems. The only difference to the building owner is that the old gas boiler installed in the building will no longer run, since the water for the building's heating system will be heated instead by the biomass system.
Q: What are biomass boilers?
A: A biomass boiler typically uses wood chips to make hot water. The boiler design we have proposed uses two-stage combustion and a sophisticated process control system, which enables very high efficiency and low emissions. The design was created by BIOS BIOENERGIESYSTEME GmbH, an Austrian engineering company that has been involved in the design of more than a hundred biomass district energy systems. BIOS recently won an international award for building one of the highest-efficiency biomass systems in the world. Their systems routinely achieve over 90-percent efficiency, meaning that nearly all of the energy available in the wood is captured to create heat.
Q: Where would the biomass boilers be located?
A: Our studies identified the most promising locations for the heating plant to be Santa Fe's Waste Transfer Station northwest of downtown, and the site of the old coal-fired power plant near Baca Street. The Waste Transfer Station has the edge, since it is city-owned and has easy highway access for hauling woodchips to the site.
Q: What about air pollution from the biomass boiler?
A: Oxygen sensors in the exhaust allow the boiler to automatically compensate for variations in the fuel, and continually adjust the combustion parameters for peak efficiency and minimum emissions. Smoke from these boilers is virtually non-existent, unlike the slash-burning process that is currently being used in many of the thinning projects surrounding Santa Fe ! Carbon-dioxide emissions, which are believed to be a primary cause of global warming, will be greatly reduced because the natural-gas boilers in Santa Fe won't be running, and the carbon-dioxide released by the biomass boilers is part of a natural carbon cycle. (The trees take up carbon throughout their life and release it again when they die. Burning them doesn't significantly alter this process.)
Q: How much biomass would be required to heat downtown Santa Fe.
A: Our analysis shows that the optimal system design would initially provide heat to about 250 downtown businesses and 250 residences, and would require about 20,000 tons of biomass per year. As the heating network grows to supply heat to more customers, measures can be taken to offset any increase in biomass fuel demand, such as by improving insulation levels in buildings and adding distributed solar-thermal sources to the network.
Q: Where would the biomass come from?
A: We studied the available quantity of biomass within a 50-mile radius of Santa Fe from commercial, municipal, and forest sources, and easily identified more than 30,000 tons of waste biomass currently available annually on a sustainable basis. Forest-thinning projects turned out to be the smallest source, since we only considered projects that were currently underway and assumed that only a small fraction of the thinned material would be available on a sustainable basis. Even with these assumptions, local thinning projects could yield between 1,300 and 4,300 tons per year. If the planned increase in thinning activity materializes, this number could grow tremendously over the next few years. From municipal sources, we found that 3,500 tons of green waste were being dumped annually in the local landfills, and that this number shoots up to about 15,000 tons in a drought year. This number would also likely grow if the tipping fees were waved and a program was developed to encourage fuel donations to a community heating system. The most surprising data came from commercial sources such as sawmills, wherein we found that sawmill operators at the ten largest sawmills surrounding Santa Fe were disposing of more than 24,000 tons of waste biomass per year. The dozens of smaller operations would likely add significantly to this number, especially as the market for selling the waste as fuel develops.
Q: How much will heat from the system cost?
A: The engineering analysis of the system performed by BIOS shows that the system could be constructed for about $23 million, and would pay for itself by selling heat for about $16.50 per MMBTU (million British Thermal Units). Since the projected cost of heat from natural gas in Santa Fe reached more than $16 per MMBTU during the winter of 2005-'06 (before prices receded due to warm weather), the biomass system is quickly becoming competitive even before considering all the benefits of having a locally owned energy system. If the system cost is subsidized as an economic development expense, the cost of heat from biomass would be even more competitive and the community benefits would increase accordingly.
Q: Can anyone connect to the biomass district heating system?
A: Connection to the system will initially be offered to about 550 customers even before the system is built. As the demand for hookups increases, the network will be expanded to meet that demand. Customers who live too far from the heating system's pipe network could be served by smaller "micro-grid" networks that also run on a combination of biomass and solar energy.
Q: What are the primary benefits of the project?
A: The biggest benefit is that the biomass system can provide affordable heat years into the future, whereas the days of affordable natural gas are numbered. (Fossil-fuel resources such as natural gas won't ever disappear, they will simply become too expensive for most of us.) So instead of watching Santa Fe plunge ever deeper into economic trouble as a result of higher and higher heating costs, the district heating system offers a realistic and near-term means for stabilizing energy costs. The increased retention of money in the local economy that results from paying heating bills to a local entity rather than an investor-owned utility also creates economic benefits-benefits that amount to many, many times the cost of the system. The opportunity to make Santa Fe the first 100 percent renewably heated city in America also has significant implications for our image nationally and internationally.
Q: Are there down sides to the project?
A: One down side will be that if the project goes forward, we'll have to undertake a massive public-works project to install the insulated pipes that are needed to carry the heat. Public-works projects are always an inconvenience, but if installed and maintained properly, the pipes should last 50 years or more. If we use this opportunity to also replace our aging and leaking municipal water pipes, we can minimize disruptions and gain additional savings in water conservation.
Q: What are the next steps to move the project forward?
A: What is really needed at this point is point is widespread understanding of the energy crisis that we face, and acceptance of this project as a powerful and practical means for addressing it. As we move into the public outreach phase of the project, we need your support in the form of memberships, donations, grants, and volunteer time. You can find out more about how to help implement this project by calling Local Energy at (505) 982-9800, or by visiting www.localenergy.org
THE DOCUMENTARY VIDEO
Q: What do you mean by renewable fuels? Fossil fuels?
A: Oil and gas are known as fossil fuels because they are actually the residue of decomposed organic matter-animals and plants, formed over several hundred million years. Renewable fuels are those that can be regenerated continuously over very short periods of time, such as trees and plants, wind, and sunshine.
Q: The film shows data on "first-year decline rate" for gas wells. What does this mean?
A: The first-year decline rate for a natural gas well provides an indication of how much additional gas might be available for production in a particular basin. When a new area is first tapped for natural gas production, the wells will continue to produce gas at the same rate for many years. But after much of the gas has been withdrawn, the wells begin to die and the rate at which gas flows from the wells slows down. Geologists track the rate at which production from each new well slows down to help determine how much more gas production can be expected from a particular basin. When the first-year decline rate of wells rises sharply, as is now occurring in the Texas Gulf , the gas supply is rapidly depleting.
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